Eyes
by Diabolical Pie
Summary: ONESHOT- Jin discovers a very ugly, unidentifiable creature in the locker room before a big fight. When the other Mishimas start to get involved, it turns into a strange family bonding experience that goes from bad to worse. Ridiculousness ensues.


Huge, bulbous eyes stared at the most powerful man in the world vacantly. Jin Kazama stared back, unease crawling over his normally calm features. In front of him was quite possibly the ugliest animal the young man had ever encountered in his life, and it was staring straight at him. Jin had been training in the locker rooms before his final fight in the tournament when the "thing" had wandered in, and he had lost track of time. Staring at the creature sitting in front of the open exit door seemed to make all sense of time vanish, worthless against the larger scale of the Universe.

Jin was at a loss! What could he do!? If he were to turn away from the creature, would that be admitting defeat? He couldn't possibly lose to such a small creature. But he had to wonder how something so tiny in size could pack so many hideous features. The most he could do to identify the thing was determine that it had four legs. Or were those tentacles? They were slimy and amorphous, and didn't seem to be either a liquid or a solid. They were definitely legs, though. Probably.

Jin's concentration on the leg-like things was broken slightly by the sound of a door slamming open behind him, but his gaze at the mystery animal didn't waver. "Jin, you cowardly, pathetic excuse of a son!" Kazuya's voice rang out, echoing through the small locker room, brimming with cold but powerful fury. "You finally realized that you weren't worth my time and decided to avoid a fight. I stood in that ring for thirty minutes waiting on you to…"

Kazuya's sentence trailed off midway as he noticed what was holding his son's attentions so strongly. Cool and collected before, the dark man's complexion started to pale in open horror. Huge, empty eyes seemed to stare straight into Kazuya's icy veins. He couldn't think of any way to describe them besides gigantic, like they were about to pop out of whatever Kazuya assumed to be the thing's face, although it was impossible to tell where its face ended and where its body began.

His body feeling numb and empty, Kazuya unconsciously walked over and slowly sat down next to his son on a wooden bench in the middle of the room, his eyes never leaving the animal. Kazuya wasn't at all a squeamish man- the Devil itself was a part of him, for Pete's sake- but he had never seen anything so terrifying as this. He felt like its eyes were slowly sucking away what was left of the man's soul, but it was impossible to tear his gaze away. Perhaps if he stared longer, he could figure out if those things on its head were horns, ears, or antennae. Perhaps…

In retrospect, this was probably the closest thing to father and son bonding time the two men had ever shared. It might have been sort of sweet in its own contorted fashion, if the creature wasn't still there, staring. And staring. And staring…

The sort-of-sweet-but-mostly-messed-up-father-and-son-moment was disrupted by boisterous, obnoxious laughter that could have been recognized anywhere. "I was planning on capturing you both separately after the tournament. How convenient of you two to get together for me!" Heihachi let out another bout of roaring laughter as he strutted into the room, then took a casual fighting stance. "Come at me now! I'll take you both…"

The old master's booming voice trailed off as he realized that neither Jin nor Kazuya were paying any attention to him. His cheerful smirk turned to a hard frown, and he was about to get angry when he heard it.

It was soft at first, almost unnoticeable against the silence, and it was no wonder he hadn't heard it while he was talking. The more he listened, however, the more powerful the sound became. It was breathing- or at least, breathing was the closest thing Heihachi could associate with the sound. Honestly, it sounded more like the final dying breaths of a horse giving birth to an elephant, mixed with a grating snort, like the sound of sound of human bone being shattered and ripping itself out of the skin from the inside, making every single hair on the muscular man's body rise.

When he located the source of the breathing, he immediately wished he hadn't. For a man with nothing but darkness in his heart, he realized that he could never compare to the satanic aura this beast gave off. It was covered in something that looked like it could have either been sandpaper or pubic hair, and Heihachi wondered if it was possible for something so hideous to even be conceived. After staring longer, he decided that no holy union between animals could create such a creature, and that it must have come from outer space. Then again, maybe it came from hell. Wherever it came from, the man was sure he could figure it out if he kept staring at it. Staring into its enormous, consuming eyes…

Heihachi hadn't even realized that he was sitting next to Kazuya and Jin when a roaring, echoing voice shook the walls. "HEIHACHI! I'VE COME BACK FROM DEATH AND THE DEPTHS OF HELL TO ENACT VENGEANCE UPON YOU!" The hulking figure of Jinpachi barely fit through the frame of the door, and the floor of the ground around him shattered against the might of his god-like power. "PREPARE YOURSELF TO FACE… my… wrath…"

Just as the previous two men had fallen silent in the face of true horror, so too did the ghost of Jinpachi, who had risen from the grave out of pure hatred and willpower. Enough willpower to bring oneself back to life wasn't enough to bring himself to look away from the animal sitting in the opposite doorway. The thing was covered in wrinkled bags of flesh that were covered in dozens of tumorous masses. It seemed to have a tail, but it could have just as easily have been a second head. The only way that Jinpachi could tell that it had a head in the first place was its eyes that seemed to compose a quarter of its body mass.

The ghost gently pushed Heihachi over on the increasingly crowded bench to sit down, and the man complied feebly. Jinpachi just couldn't take his eyes away from the thing, it was so horrific yet beautiful in its pure abomination. His eyes met the creature's own, and even the ghost shuddered at the emptiness there. There was such a lack of life in those eyes, it made him want to crawl back into the grave from which he came. But he couldn't do that. If he did that, he would never be able to figure out if those things on the top of its body were teeth or claws. If he just stared a little bit longer…

And so the crowded locker room was filled with silence, save for the sickly noise that was somewhat-but-not-quite like breathing. Four endlessly powerful men stared in terror, confusion, and uncontrollable awe, and two massive eyes stared back, devoid of all life and hope. An unspoken question hung in the air like a wrecking ball, waiting to drop.

What… what was this _thing_!?

Asuka was searching frantically, looking under every table and chair in the arena. "Oh no no no…" she whispered under her breath, worry filling every word. "Where could he be!? He couldn't have gotten far!"

She turned a corner, rushing down the hallway at maximum speed.

And that was when she found the first body.

She gasped in horror, looking at the black-suited man with wide eyes. Was he really dead!? She quickly flipped him over, and his face alone was enough to confirm it. His eyes had sunken deep into the back of his skull, and looked like huge, round orbs. The irises seemed to have been sucked out of color, and the wrinkles around the man's face made him look over one hundred years old, although Asuka could tell by his fairly fit body that the man couldn't have been over fifty.

Struggling to remain calm and keep herself from hyperventilating, she looked down the hall to see another security guard standing stiffly at his post. _Oh thank God_, she thought to herself, rushing quickly towards the man, grateful to have someone to help her deal with the current situation.

Then she realized that this man, too was dead, his eyes wide and empty, and his face aged beyond his years.

It was too horrifying for the girl to even scream, and she merely backed away and fell to her knees wordlessly. Her eyes flickered around the next corner of the hallway, and there she saw a foot laying still on the floor, the rest of the body hidden by the wall in front of her. Dreading the sight of another body but determined to see it, Asuka slowly turned her torso to the left, granting her vision inch by inch of the narrow, dimly lit hallway around the bend, and the corpse of the foot she had noticed.

Only it wasn't just one.

Hundreds of corpses piled around the hallway, filling the building with the overpowering reek of death. The small girl stood up slowly and started to walk among them, her mouth gaping slightly and her expression neutral. Her mind seemed incapable of dealing with reality. She followed the trail of contorted bodies, unsure of where they would lead, but certain that she had to follow them.

Body after body she passed, until suddenly the trail ended at a narrow hallway. The lights had burnt out, and were flickering ever so slightly, illuminating the ghastly white tiles covering the floor and walls with a sporadic neon light. The light was colorless, as if it too had had the life sucked out of it.

At the end of the hallway was an open door with a room filled with darkness. The scarred girl made her way slowly to the entrance, tentatively reaching her trembling hand inside and fumbling against the freezing tile wall for a light switch. Her fingers found it and she flicked it on.

The haggard figures of Jin, Kazuya, Heihachi, and Jinpachi greeted the girl as the lights sputtered to life. Azuka let out a yelp and leaped backwards, and she thought that they were dead too until she saw the movement of their chests, indicating breathing. All of them seemed to have their eyes fixated at something at her feet.

Azuka looked down to see what they were staring at.

The girl let out a delighted cry of joy. "Prince Furdinand! There you are! I was looking everywhere for you!" She jumped up and down and scooped the small animal up in her arms, a trail of slime coating her arms as the creature's vacant eyes stared up at the ceiling. She seemed to have completely forgotten the hundreds of dead bodies she'd encountered on her way here in her happiness of being reunited with her lost friend.

This disturbance seemed to break the men out of their trance somewhat, and Jin managed to blink once or twice. His mouth opened slowly, and words came out. They sounded foreign, like an ancient artform once learned and long forgotten. "Prince… Furdinand…?" he uttered, disbelief filling his tone.

"Yeah! It's kinda goofy, but I think it's a cute name, don't you, Jin?" Asuka gave her cousin a huge, toothy grin.

Now it was Kazuya's turn to blink and speak. "You… you named that… thing…?" His voice was empty and dry.

The girl seemed taken aback. "Of course I named him! All puppies need names!" She bounced the thing up and down in her arms like it was some kind of overgrown baby. "I found him in a cardboard box in an alley behind the arena," the girl said, nuzzling what resembled the creature's nose against hers as she did so. "It's so sad that people just abandon their animals these days. I couldn't just leave him!"

Jin closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, obviously feeling physical pain from looking at the thing for so long. "Asuka… I don't think that thing is a dog… or even from planet Earth, for that matter…"

Asuka stuck her tongue out at her cousin. "Of course he's a dog, you idiot! Look! He's got eyes, and… uh… eyes… and… well, what other animal besides a dog could have cute, huge puppy eyes like this!?" She held out the animal at arm length to display the thing to the men to stress her point.

It stared at them.

They stared back.

Silence once again filled the room, and after an eternity of silence passed, it was surprisingly the ugliest creature in the universe that broke it with a sound consisting of a single, simple syllable.

"Bark!"


End file.
